VMP Magazine

Like many of us, Seth Nyquist found himself thinking more deeply about the passage of time over the course of the pandemic. The Toronto-born songwriter and producer’s new album Semblance — his full-length debut as MorMor after building considerable momentum on the heels of immaculate, genre-blurring gems like “Heaven’s Only Wishful,” “Whatever Comes to Mind” and “Outside” — traces a path from “Dawn” to “Days End.” The album follows Nyquist on an introspective journey from the dissolution of “a love that wasn’t true” to being at peace with a lifetime of unpredictable tides, as he narrates in spoken word on the gentle closer “Quiet Heart.” Aching but clear-headed, Semblance is a moving portrait of, as Nyquist himself describes it, “what is important to me, knowing that you only have a finite amount of time.”

VMP called up the restless artist as she shares the influences behind her original soundtrack for the new open-world adventure, Sable, and how the experience was a pleasant departure from writing for her main gig as Japanese Breakfast.

We tend to lose our sense of imagination as we get older, a functional decline we mourn among the many sacrifices of growing up. But this loss is, at least in part, due to having less of a need for it over time. We learn language before we've lived its contents, becoming endowed at a young age with a vocabulary to describe experiences we’ve yet to understand, many of which we won’t come to for a long time after. Eventually, we encounter those definitions for ourselves, forming our own relationships with the meanings of words that make their imprint hyper-specific and personal, rather than universal and open-ended.

VMP Rising is our series where we partner with up-and-coming artists to press their music to vinyl and highlight artists we think are going to be the Next Big Thing. Today we’re featuring Love, Nostalgia, the debut LP from Dreamer Boy.

Every week, we tell you about an album we think you need to spend time with. This week’s album is I’m All Ears, the new album from Let’s Eat Grandma.

Every week, we tell you about an album we think you need to spend time with. This week’s album is Bon Voyage, the new album from French singer Melody’s Echo Chamber.

Every week, we tell you about an album we think you need to spend time with. This week's album is The Future and the Past, the new album from Natalie Prass.

A U.S. passport is among the strongest in the world, granting its citizens access to 185 countries without a visa. Yet the U.S. is also one of the most restrictive places for outsiders, holding a shameful history of exclusion and deportation, in addition to prohibitive immigration processes and outright travel bans. Customs are just another arm of government censorship, a reality the London-raised, Sri Lankan refugee Maya Arulpragasam had long lived and depicted in her music as M.I.A. prior to being prevented from entering the U.S. in 2006.

M.I.A. had called the U.S. home while touring the world in support of her critically acclaimed debut Arular. The record was named after her father, whose ties to political Tamil groups during the Sri Lankan Civil War would help define his daughter’s riotous artistic perspective, and then go on to prevent her from gaining a long-term work visa and subsequent reentry to the country when she tried to return. As a result, M.I.A. was boxed out of both her creative hub and residence in Brooklyn, missing out on the lavish opportunities that come from scoring big with a major label. If a few government officials had acted differently, M.I.A. might have been able to follow through on her intention to record much of her planned sophomore album with Timbaland. Then, she might have charted a path like both Missy Elliott and Justin Timberlake as the producer’s muse and maestro, taking a more traditional road to fame in the process.

Instead, M.I.A. made Kala. Rather than wait for clearance to return to work in the U.S., she chose to embark on a globe-trotting free-range recording vacation across several regions and a dozen cities, incorporating the influences of a diverse pool of cultures. Many of these locales were not ones cited in tourist guides or by trip advisors, but rather what some unfortunately referred to as “third world” countries, the kinds ravaged by domestic conflict, economic depression or often both. She brought the residents she encountered directly into pop-up recording studios, keeping their unique musical styles and expressions largely unfiltered even as she weaved them together into her audio travelogue. The result is a vision of a borderless society, one defined by the margins of the world, from Aborginal Australian pre-teens to fishermen on the South Indian coast.

Tracing the modern DNA of rap back to its original mutation, each proposed innovator can be found standing on the shoulder of a prior giant. Take Care, for example, refined the image of the kingpin for the “u up?” era, softening the genre’s sound while sharpening its self-pity, but Drake and Noah 40’s style evolved from the more lurching R&B of House Of Balloons. While the Weeknd’s industrial bedroom bangers converged the sounds of hip-hop and pop within the left-field, producers Illangelo and Doc McKinney owe their approach on the landmark mixtape to another landmark, 808s & Heartbreak. Kanye West tore the wallpaper off rap music to expose a bleeding, blipping center that fundamentally invented the entire next decade of melodic hip-hop subgenres, but even Ye crafted the style of his game-changing fourth studio album upon the influence of a young recluse from Cleveland, Ohio.

The cover of Caleb Landry Jones’ debut album says it was recorded in 2019, which is technically true. But the story of Jones the musician is actually more than a decade in the making, as is The Mother Stone, an anthology culled from over 700 songs he’s compiled since first writing music at the age of 16.

Every week, we tell you about an album we think you need to spend time with. This week’s album is As If It Were Forever, the solo debut LP from vocal powerhouse Anna Wise.

At first there was nothing, and then there was Froth. The group formed before any of its members had even played music together, before they even realized that playing music was something they could try. In reverse order of how it works for almost every other band, Froth got offered their shot prior to asking for it, when a friend who pressed vinyl in their hometown of El Segundo gave them the opportunity to create their own. Originally intending only to design the cover art for a blank 12”, the group figured they may as well actually pack the grooves with something. They started jamming as a joke, before it quickly became apparent that what they were messing around with sounded pretty good. They’ve been filling and releasing LPs for real ever since.

Now a trio following the departure of original member Jeff Fribourg, SoCal natives Joo-Joo Ashworth, Jeremy Katz, and Cameron Allen have put together in their half-decade existence one of the richest catalogs of their region’s notorious slacker-rock class. The band’s previous efforts, from their fizzy Burger Records debut Patterns to 2017’s more laconic Outside (briefly), have all spanned wide sonic ground. Froth’s charmingly unconcerned style first fixated on a buzzing psychedelia characteristic of other California garage rockers like Mikal Cronin and Ty Segall, making use of elevator music guitars, bright phasered arpeggios, and lackadaisical rhythms.

Every week, we tell you about an album we think you need to spend time with. This week's album is Clean, the debut LP from Soccer Mommy.

I’ll be honest, I didn’t watch a whole lot of late night television in 2017. I didn’t especially want to. The whiplash of the same comedy platforms that helped normalize the encroaching decay of our standards of dignity as a country puffing up a whole lot of hot air against the man who embodied it to record ratings made me at best uncomfortable, and at worst bitter and cynical. I was never in the mood to simply laugh off the appalling headlines that comprised this hellscape of the last 365+ days, especially as they were quarantined off in “opening monologues” from white men all named Jimmy trying to sell me another celebrity’s latest project. Last year I cited late night musical performances as “one of the last remaining monocultures of music consumption,” but as tensions over issues of real consequence become increasingly irreconcilable -- as our self-definition comprises more of what we aren’t than are -- the idea that the shows selling us “carpool karaoke” are going to bring us all together made my stomach churn.

Yet there’s a double-edged beauty to how the internet strips all context from our content, and that’s how we can enjoy our favorite artists tear it up on a national stage without first sitting through commercialized “entertainers” making jokes about political atrocities that in most cases will not affect them. The point is, late night slots are still a uniquely significant setting for live music (if no longer for comedy). They’re often a band’s first exposure to the wider public after toiling away in perpetual print praise. And when veterans return to the platform, they often do so to make a statement out of the space -- rearranging the narrative constructed for them with the powerful combination of simply a camera and their own voice. The following names on this list represent everything from loudmouth breakouts that proved personally validating during a year when our collective rancor felt increasingly unheard, to an expectedly expectation-bending display from the most recently-inducted legend of the form. These musicians continued to make shine the sole bright spot in an increasingly dim medium.

We’re releasing an exclusive, 20th anniversary edition of Grandaddy’s Under The Western Freeway in our store this month. Here’s an essay about the album and how it’s still relevant themes of isolation, loneliness and the limitations of existence.

Pink Floyd's Animals turns 40 today. Often set aside when considering the band's "best" album in favor of Dark Side of the Moon or The Wall, we make the case that it's the band's most resonant album.

Every week we tell you about an album we think you need to spend time with. This week it’s Tourist In This Town, the debut solo album from Allison Crutchfield, formerly of Swearin’.

Musical guests on late night television are one of the last remaining monocultures of music consumption, enjoyed by both the mainstream and underground alike. Where we all make contact with music on our own terms, increasingly divided across platforms and curators, late night has always felt like a common thread — a space for us all to be, even if just briefly, in the same audience for a night. As every other aspect of our cultural landscape morphs and realigns, late night music programming has remained surprisingly intact. It’s enduring, but nonetheless still kicking with vitality. The artistic gestures created for and documented by national television can capture uniquely an artist’s grand introduction to their latest work, setting the tone for how we understand their vision. Elsewhere, bands can shift a stubborn narrative they find themselves locked into after delivering a cultural touchstone that resets their perception. This power is singular to the platform; we no longer listen to the radio together, read the same blogs, or attend the same concerts, but at least we together still watch these same performances. Here’s to the best moments of the medium over the last twelve months, and long live late night.

Photo by Jasmine Safaeian

At the age of 18, Porter Robinson became a leading voice in the early days of EDM’s sudden and simultaneous takeover of both the underground and the mainstream. The self-taught North Carolina producer got an immediate co-sign from Skrillex at peak-dubstep, which launched a anticipated and major label-backed rollout toward the debut album that would position him within electronic music's vanguard. And there are few ways to view Worlds other than as a king-making work. The audacious project set out to conjure nostalgia for the immersive imaginations of our pasts, translating 8-bit melodies into widescreen epics and the chipper rush of M83 and Passion Pit for the rave tent. It’s all-encompassing and richly textured soundscapes set Robinson apart from his peers while also vaulting him to the top of his field, earning him headliner-billing at festivals and endearing him with one of contemporary music’s most devoted fanbases.